Mapping Controversies over a Potential Turn to Quality in Chinese Wind Power

Kirkegaard, Julia Kirch(Frederiksberg, 2015)

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The thesis inquires into dynamics and controversies of constructing a market for
wind power in China. Inquiring into what the thesis dubs a quality crisis in
Chinese wind power after years of high growth rates, and into a potential turn to
quality, the thesis traces such current ambiguous winds of change with point of
departure in the notion of global innovation networks (GINs). Thus, it looks into
how international collaborations on critical components, such as software
programmes, play a critical role in the qualification of wind power as a
‘sustainable’ renewable energy source.
However, with a structural rather than micro-relational or processual lens, the
existing GIN literature is claimed to be ill-equipped to grasp the genesis,
dynamics, and agency of GINs. To fill this gap, the thesis develops a situational,
constructivist framework based in Science and Technology Studies, which renders
a processual and relational understanding of GINs as part and parcel of market
construction. It does this by initially ‘looking away’ from the original metaphor of
GINs, with the result of effectively reconceptualising it. This is done by
illustrating the dynamics and the agency of GIN genesis through a mapping of
controversies over issues of Intellectual Property Rights, standardisation, money,
and cost and price calculations, entangled in a Chinese ‘system problem’ of stateowned
actors and a Chinese experimental pragmatism of market construction,
which has had unintended effects.
Tracing one potential GIN taking shape around a critical component, the thesis
also contributes to the GIN literature through a new methodological approach.
Illustrating the potentially disruptive dynamics of GIN construction, and how the
emerging GIN around software programmes possesses disruptive agency in regard
to the framing of the emerging Chinese wind power market, the thesis sheds light
on some of the socio-material work needed to construct and maintain GINs and
the markets it co-constitutes and is co-constituted by, as well as the negotiated
roles, identities, and positions of actors in a developmental context of China. The
thesis coins the seemingly particular Chinese mode of market construction within
wind power a fragmented and experimental ‘pragmatics of (green) market
construction’, with its agile responses to emerging issues. Last, to overcome the dualism between structural and processual accounts, the
thesis draws on the pragmatist notion of figuration (Elias, 1978). After
demonstrating a potential figurational change reflected in the ongoing turn to
quality, the thesis also considers the implications that the inquiry has for other
related literatures, hereunder proposing a new research agenda for New Economic
Sociology to understand market and GIN construction in a developmental context,
which holds a promise for inquiring into China’s self- and other-disruptive, yet
potentially path-creating modes of development and upgrading.

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The Importance of Critical Mass and the Consequences of Scarcity for Television Markets

Berg, Christian Edelvold(Frederiksberg, 2013)

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This thesis “As a matter of size” demonstrates that size does indeed matter. Television markets
have common characteristics across small and large markets, but the implications of these
characteristics are varied due to the difference in size of economy and population. The influence
of variable size is a consequence of the economic conditions of scarcity (limited resources) and
thus the relative critical mass of the media market. Thus, the influence of size is an expression of
the television market's inability to operate on normal market terms for provisioning particular
types of services. Larger markets (measured by economy and population) have a higher
potential of securing such content commercially. But all markets suffer from challenges in
securing provisioning of original domestic content. Market intervention and public subsidy play
an important role when it comes to securing domestic production. Political intervention can to
some extent counteract the effects of the common characteristics, by changing market conditions
through political regulation or subsidisation.
The thesis shows that the European television markets mainly operate under conditions of
oligopoly, usually in the form of different types of duopolies. The effect of size on market
concentration is not as unambiguous as estimated in the literature, as the scope and extent of
market intervention influence this quite intensely. Moreover, the study shows that television
markets are dominated by relatively few, usually local, media companies and the multinational
companies in most markets currently do not pose a real danger - but there are signs of a
development which requires further research. Public service companies remain relatively strong
in the markets studied, and continue to play an important role as a counterweight to national and
international commercial competitors.
Different markets require different policies that take into account the conditions in that specific
market, in order to achieve a certain desirable merited effect. The thesis supports the view that a
"one size fits all" policy across several markets when it comes to media regulation, risks not
yielding the warranted results. Markets with different conditions, exposed to the same type of
regulation, might have overall positive effects, but could also easily have a very negative impact
if the conditions in a particular market do not fit with the intent of the policy. It is therefore far
from certain that a "one size fits all" regulation will have the intended uniform effect on the
affected market across several markets.
This is especially true for markets that are challenged by having both a small population and a
small economy. In a sense it is a paradox that the interest at European level in fair competition
and equal opportunity for success can lead to different conditions of competition in a domestic
market, as players may be subject to various conditions (in a way it can also be regarded as a consequence of domestic policy interventions), where the domestic players can face a strong
international player, and as a result of the internal market and the Audiovisual Media Services
directive, can achieve a competitive advantage, for example in relation to choosing the most
lenient advertising rules.
The analytical work of the thesis can substantiate claims that size has a significant effect and
that there are concrete policy implications depending on size of economy and population, due to
scarcity of resources in the individual market.

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Analysis of the influence of the Chicago School on European Union competition policy

Bartalevich, Dzmitry(Frederiksberg, 2017)

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Adopting the (institutionalist) premise that ideas and the economic theories within which they are embedded
influence policy, the dissertation investigates the influence of the Chicago School of antitrust analysis on the
competition policy of the European Union (EU). The dissertation encapsulates three articles. The first article
employs qualitative content analysis to assess whether and the extent to which the European Commission
incorporates Chicago School theory into EU competition policy. It does so on the basis of current Commission
Guidelines, Notices, and Block Exemption Regulations that address EU antitrust rules and EU merger control.
The second article is exploratory; it narrows the focus on EU merger control and employs descriptive network
analysis to investigate the overall composition of mergers cleared by the Commission during the period 2004–
2015 and attempts to reinforce the results of the analysis in the first article. The third article expands on the
findings of the first and second articles and employs inferential network analysis with exponential random graph
models to analyze, on the basis of Commission merger cases cleared during the period 2004–2015, whether the
Harvard School, the Freiburg School, and considerations for Single Market integration underpin EU merger
control, in addition to the influence of the Chicago School. The analysis presented in the articles suggests that the
Chicago School has exerted considerable influence over EU competition policy. The findings further indicate that
there is a strong presence of financial institutions among merger and acquisition transactions with an EU
dimension in EU merger control. Finally, the findings show that the Commission appears to have a particular
approach to EU competition policy that, despite being influenced by the Chicago School, cannot be explained
entirely by it.

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Who are the members of the most powerful group in the Danish society? To answer this question, we
explored the elite through two different methodological approaches. Using correspondence analysis, we
charted the oppositions structuring two exclusive groups, the 100 most important Danish CEOs and the
1,527 elite individuals identified in the Danish Power and Democracy Study in 1999. Through social
network analysis, we identified and explored the integration of a core of the power network in Denmark –
the power elite - and the inner circle of the corporate elite.
The importance of how the elite is defined or identified is discussed in relation with the most widely used
method for the study of national elites. With the positional method the size and composition is defined as
the data is constructed. We propose a new data sensitive method that identifies a cohesive elite with social
network analysis. This lets us analyse the composition and like C.W. Mills identify the key institutional
orders in Denmark.

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What effect do evaluation systems have on the use of evaluation? This is the
research question guiding this PhD thesis. By answering this research question as
well as three sub-questions, the thesis addresses three important gaps in the
evaluation literature: the first gap is that evaluation theory does a poor job
explaining non-use and justificatory uses of evaluation. The second gap is that
evaluation theory does not account for the systemic context of evaluation in its
more general explanations of evaluation use. Finally, the literature does not
account empirically for the micro-level of evaluation use in evaluation systems.
The thesis draws inspiration from organisational theory and in particular
organisational institutionalism. Organisational institutionalism explains
organisational action and change to be driven by legitimacy-seeking organisational
behaviour. Organisations seek to legitimise themselves in order to survive in their
environment. This theory is applied to the concept ‘evaluation system’. Hence, the
assumption underlying this thesis is that organisations within an evaluation system
are using evaluations to appear accountable rather than improve policies.
The thesis investigates the European Union’s evaluation system with a particular
focus on the European Commission. This is done in four articles. The first article
is a theoretical article introducing organisational institutionalism to the evaluation
literature in order to explain non-use and justificatory uses of evaluations. The
second article is a historical analysis of the development of the European
Commissions evaluation practices. The third article is a case-based analysis of
evaluation use in the European Commission. The fourth article is also an empirical
article on policy learning from evaluations in three different Directorate-Generals
in the European Commission. The methodology used in the empirical articles is
qualitative content analysis and the data were more than a hundred Commission
documents and 58 interviews with Commission staff.

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News publishers in the industrialized world are experiencing a fundamental challenge to their business
models because of the changing modes of consumption, competition, and production of their offerings that
are associated with the emergence of the networked information society. The erosion of the traditional
business models poses an existential threat to news publishing and has given rise to a continuing struggle
among news publishers to design digital business models that will be sustainable in the future.
This dissertation argues that a central and underresearched aspect of digital news publishing business
models concerns the production networks that support the co-production of digital news offerings. To fill
this knowledge gap, this dissertation explores the strategic design of the digital news publishing production
networks that are associated with HTML-based news offerings on the open Web. In order to do so, a
theoretical model is developed that is suited for the analysis of the strategic design of business models,
including the production networks that support them, in the sectors of the economy that are affected by
networked informatization in general and in digital news publishing specifically. The theoretical model
includes a business model construct that enables a detailed analysis of production networks and an
integrated strategy theory that combines networked-based approaches to value creation and capture with
Emerson’s power-dependence theory in order to conceptualize both collaboration and competition
strategies. In addition, a novel method is developed that can be used to collect and analyze very large
amounts of data on the resource exchanges that take place between news publishers and their business
partners. The method allows for systematic mapping of the flows of resources in digital news publishing
ecologies and of the production networks that are associated with the co-production of digital news
offerings.
The theoretical model and methodology developed in the dissertation are used to explore the American
digital news publishing ecology and the strategies that 41 different leading American news publishers use
to design their production networks. In the analysis, the activities carried out by and resource flows
between a total of 1,356 business partners and news publishers in the American digital news publishing
ecology are identified and visualized. In addition, a fundamental architecture that is shared by all digital
news publishing production networks and a typology of 9 different types of production networks are
identified. Furthermore, it is found that the structure of the American digital news publishing ecology is
highly asymmetric and gives rise to a number of specific strategic dilemmas for news publishers. Finally, 9
different types of strategies that news publishers use to design their production networks, each of which
mediates the dilemmas they face in different ways, are identified. In the conclusion to the dissertation, the
findings of the dissertation are discussed, put into perspective, and connected to the existing research on
other elements in digital news publishing business models in order to bring us closer to a holistic theory of
the strategic design of digital news publishing business models.

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The thesis argues that security sector reform (SSR) has failed according to its own
ambition of establishing a ‘centrally governed state’. A primary reason for this failure is
found in the concept of authority that state-building projects and much of the academic
work that underpins it.
Since the late 1990s, internationally supported efforts to make and consolidate peace in
Sierra Leone have been synonymous with SSR. Support was given by the United Kingdom
(UK) in particular to contain and ultimately overhaul the armed forces, which staged two
coups in 1992 and 1997. Support was also provided to the central government to institute
national security coordination and intelligence organizations, and to reestablish the Sierra
Leone Police (SLP). The collapsed, but internationally recognized state was to be rebuilt,
and security was seen as not only a prerequisite for this process to begin, but its very
foundation.
The first question of the thesis revolves around why the western universalist state concept
came to guide SSR in Sierra Leone, and why it was considered of such fundamental
importance to stability internationally. The second question revolves around how to
conceptualize authority when actors such as paramount and lesser chiefs that may neither
be categorized as state nor non-state are the primary makers of order in rural areas of the
country.
Speaking of the weakness or failure of a state is a way of describing what it is not, namely
a centrally governed set of institutions that is able to make order within the territorial space
that defines it. A focus on the state as an analytical concept does not, however, tell us much
about how order is then made, and by whom it is made in Sierra Leone.
The thesis rethinks what authority is in a way that does not privilege ‘the state’ as an
analytical category, a tendency that has dominated much policy and academic thinking.
The thesis’ empirical basis of doing so is data relating to international policy-making
processes, interviews among the key actors of Sierra Leone’s SSR process, and ethnographic fieldwork in Peyima, a small diamond mining town in Kamara Chiefdom,
Kono District.
In a view of authority tied to ‘the state’ lies the conceptualization of a political entity, a
bordered power container, which stands above, is detached from, and at the same time
encompasses, controls and regulates society. In UK support of Sierra Leone’s statebuilding
efforts, the practices of traditional leaders and their productive effects in the
justice and security field, and enforcing order, were acknowledged. However, failure to
respond adequately to their central role in governing Sierra Leone’s countryside came in
two ways, both of which are related to concepts of the western universalist state that
continue to guide SSR.
The first failure was embedded in misrecognizing the resilience and productivity of local
actors and institutions, and their authority to appropriate, interpret, translate and above all
shape the elements of what was offered through SSR. The second failure came in not
recognizing the hybrid nature of all actors in the justice and security field, based on the fact
that they draw authority to act within the field from numerous sources across physical and
symbolic space, in local and national domains. Hybridity is integral to state formation in
Sierra Leone. It is foundational, and is historically grounded in the colonial era, articulating
an infinite mixture of various forms of authority (from state legislation to status of
autochthony and secret society membership). Inevitably, this order was reproduced by
SSR, even if the aim of the international actors who supported this process of change had
been to eradicate it.

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Hierarchies, Logics and Foundations of Social Order Seen Through the Prism of EU Social Rights

Mossin, Christiane(Frederiksberg, 2015)

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It has been the purpose of this dissertation to analyze a contemporary battlefield of law,
the field of EU social rights, from a political-philosophical point of view.
It is the conviction of the dissertation that law is deeply and inescapably conceptually
connected with fundamental features of social order. Law and social order are not
presumed to be identical, but to be mutually constitutive. The interrelations between
the two do not merely concern the rights and obligations explicitly laid down in the
law, but fundamental presumptions regarding the nature of human beings, overall
purposes of social order, hierarchical and dynamical features of society and the
possibility at all of regulation, its logics and sources of authority.
On the basis of a historical-conceptual understanding of law according to which law,
social structure and metaphysical presumptions are inescapably intertwined, the
dissertation derives from the binding provisions of law certain essential features of
social order. More precisely, the dissertation demonstrates that from a political
philosophical point of view, EU social rights can be said to imply the contours of a
particular social order. Significantly, the essential features in question are derived
through detailed analyses of EU social rights - through critical investigations of
definitions of right-holders, material scope, legal core concepts, exclusions and
justifications, complexities and ambiguities of interpretation. The general point is the
following: Political philosophical features of social order may not only be derived from
the overall constitutional aspects of law (in the case of EU-law: fundamental principles
inscribed in the Treaty; the constitutional architecture of EU-law), but are implied in the
detailed material web of secondary law.

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How the United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark Came to Compete through their Knowledge Regimes from 1993 to 2007

Møller Boje Rasmussen, Martin(Frederiksberg, 2014)

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The present PhD-dissertation ” ”Is Competitiveness a Question of Being Alike?
How United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark came to compete through their
Knowledge Regimes from 1993 to 2007” studies the ideas which policy research
organizations such as ministries of economics, economic councils and different
types of think tanks – or what Campbell and Pedersen recently have defined as a
nations knowledge regime – holds about the international competition of nations
and what a nations competitiveness consists in, as well as whether and how these
ideas co-varies with different national knowledge regimes particular form and
organization. The primary argument and research result is, that even if the ideas,
which policy research organizations in United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark
in the period from 1993 to 2007 holds, in many ways are similar, they nonetheless
exhibit nationally distinct features and differences. In short, the PhD-dissertation
demonstrates, that not only does the organization of knowledge regimes vary. So
do the ideas they produce.

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An Embedded, Comparative Case Study of Municipal Waste Management in England And Denmark

Dam, Sofie(Frederiksberg, 2015)

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This PhD concerns the potentials and challenges for conducting innovation in
public-private partnerships (PPPs) towards the objective of transforming
municipal waste management towards more sustainable systems. In recent years,
local authorities have been met with intensified demands from the EU and national
governments to change existing waste management systems from solutions based
on disposal and recovery towards more recycling and prevention and at the same
time deliver more efficient waste management services through the inclusion of
private businesses. These two demands may to some degree be mutually
supportive, but may also lead to challenges in the prioritization and development
of new solutions.

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With Comparative and Multi-level Case Studies from Denmark and Ireland

Helby Petersen, Ole(Frederiksberg, 2011)

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This PhD dissertation studies national similarities and differences in policy and regulation of
public-private partnerships (PPPs), with an empirical focus on Denmark and Ireland. The starting
point and motivation for the study is the observation that whereas PPPs are often depicted in the
academic literature and in policy practice as a globally disseminated governance scheme, in reality,
a closer examination of the PPP reform landscape reveals significant differences in national
governments’ PPP policy and regulation and in the amount of actually implemented PPP projects.
By comparing the initiatives taken by the Irish government, which has embraced PPPs, with those
of the Danish government, which has been a PPP sceptic, this study inquires into the fundamental
questions as to how, why and to what consequences some governments have developed widespread
policy and regulation frameworks to support the implementation of PPPs, whereas others have been
much more reluctant. The dissertation addressed four research questions: (i) what are the key actors,
strategies and institutions that create policies and regulations for the formation of PPPs?; (ii) how
did governments’ PPP policies and regulations develop over time, and how can their similarities
and differences be explained?; (iii) how do differing national policy and regulation frameworks
serve to facilitate or hinder the formation of PPPs, exemplified by four case studies from the
schools sector?; (iv) what framework conditions does the EU set for PPP initiatives at national and
sub-national levels?
The main aim of the dissertation is to study how and why national PPP policy and regulation
frameworks developed over time. At the national government level, the study thus contains both
diachronic and synchronic analysis. Furthermore, in line with previous research within what has
been called the governance approach within PPP studies, policy and regulation are also seen as
constitutive elements that tap into and set the general framework conditions and institutional ‘rules
of the game’ for the realisation of concrete PPP projects. The comparative interest at the central
government level is thus supplemented by an analysis (a) of the interplay between decisions about
policy and regulation at the national level and the formation of concrete PPP projects, and (b) of the
EU’s role in regulating decisions about PPPs at national level and in relation to the formation of
concrete PPP schemes. A main finding is that whereas academic PPP literature often portrays
governments’ rationales for resorting to PPPs in terms of achieving innovation, collaborative
advantage, value-for-money, new market possibilities, improved risk sharing etc., the findings
brought to the fore in this dissertation suggest that a primary objective indeed was to remove major public infrastructure investments from governments’ balance sheets, and thereby reduce the
pressure on public capital budgets and provide more infrastructure than would otherwise be
possible. However, as the off balance sheet rationale has been shown to be largely false, because
there is always a bill to pay in the long term, this raise a number of broader legitimacy and
accountability issues, which the present PPP policy and regulation frameworks of governments do
not seem to adequately address.

This thesis addresses the need, development and management of trust in Public-Private
Partnerships (PPPs), an issue that thus far has received only very little attention. For this
purpose, the dissertation contributes with four separate articles, of which the first two explore
the main concepts – PPPs and trust – while the last two present the empirical exploration of
trusting in PPPs by drawing on four in-depth case studies.
The exploration of the PPP concept in the first article focuses on the definitory and classificatory
practices across disciplinary and professional fields and contributes with an inductive map of the
dominant patterns. The review of PPP publications argues that the main divergence lies in the
focus on two differing dimensions. While a first group focuses on PPPs as a new way of
distributing responsibilities across public and private partners a second group defines PPPs as a
new means for joint decision-making and interactive collaboration between public and private
partners. For the thesis it is especially the second dimension – the relational - that becomes
relevant when trust moves centre-stage.
In the second article, the dissertation addresses trust conceptualizations in an interorganizational
setting. The article argues for a more processual approach to (re)embed trust in
time and space. Following, the paper develops a processual framework for studying interorganizational
trusting as ever evolving, always embedded and not least rooted in individual
experiences of organizational members from various organizational levels. Finally, the article
highlights the constitutive importance of contingency not only creating the need for trust but
also its precondition. It is because we experience the future as open (contingent) that we are in
need and able to form trust, i.e. suspend doubts and form positive expectations about another’s
future behaviour despite he/she has the possibility for alternative actions.

This doctoral dissertation aims to understand how companies realize corporate
responsibility—both how they perform corporate responsibility in particular local
contexts and how they negotiate understandings of what corporate responsibility
means. It builds on an inductive case study of the Danish pharmaceutical company
Novo Nordisk, a company known for its remarkable investments in integrating societal
objectives into its business model and promoting new ways of thinking about and doing
business. The case inspired the overarching theoretical question how actors construct
and legitimize new ideas and practices at the nascent stages of institutional change. To
address this question, the dissertation develops a micro-sociological approach to
institutional change that brings to light how actors struggle over meaning in power
relations by focusing on processes of positioning and framing. The three articles in this
dissertation unfold distinct yet interdependent processes of positioning and framing
that constitute new ways of performing and understanding corporate responsibility.

Much of the organizational institutionalism literature suggests that the
phenomenon of interests is a central construct, however, portrays interests in an overly
deterministic, rational, and liberal way. In this thesis, I challenge those views and
suggest that interests are a complex and interdependent socially constructed phenomenon.
Accordingly, interests represent an actor’s recognition, perceived importance, and
participation in a number of figurations and social games. Illustrated through the
institution of U.S. chambers of commerce, I explore how chambers of commerce have
withstood a changing American culture to become both the world’s largest business
federation and public-private partnership. Moreover, even as the United States
represents the most liberal of liberal market economies, chambers of commerce represent
a context where capitalists have set aside market competition and unified their interests to
become one of the largest and most influential institutions in the world.
Following a brief introduction of interests and chambers of commerce, this thesis
begins with the first paper, which is a critical review of the phenomenon of interests
within the organizational institutionalism literature. Tracing the conceptual variety of
both the origins and functions of interests in institutional studies, I illustrate how an
overly deterministic and rational view of interests is problematic. The critical review
continues with a discussion of my critiques of the extant literature followed by an
introduction of a less rational and calculative approach to interests by coupling
Bourdieu’s (1998) conceptualization of interests with Elias’s (1978) sociology
emphasizing figurations and social games. The three subsequent empirical papers test this approach to interests on macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of the institution of
chambers of commerce.

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This thesis is about the rule of law in global governance and the role of legal
expertise. It is about how contested concepts, vague wordings and political promises combine with
international legal expertise to shape political and social realities in the making of global order(s).
To this end, the aim of the thesis is to problematize and scrutinize the meaning and doings of the
rule of law as a key concept in present-day international law and politics. Drawing on the case of
internationally administered rule of law reforms in post-conflict Kosovo, the main problem I
address in the thesis is – given the ambiguity of the very meaning of the concept – how, why and
when is the meaning of the rule of law ‘fixed’, stabilized and made knowable to serve as a source
of justification for the authority of international experts in ruling the domestic legal and what are
the political implications thereof? To address this problem, I adopt a practice-oriented, multi-sited
ethnographic approach to reconstruct the different and often conflicting meanings that are
inscribed into the concept of the rule of law by various international actors, in particular
international lawyers, engaged in rule of law reforms in the period from the establishment of the
UN administration in 1999 until today where an European Union (EU) rule of law mission
exercises extensive powers within the legal field in Kosovo. The main argument of the thesis is
that the practical meaning of the rule of law in global governance is constituted through struggles
over drawing the boundary between ‘law’ and ‘politics’ in the quest towards constructing and
enacting law’s relative autonomy versus what is narrated and thus assessed as being social,
political and moral influences. This plays out in the often mundane, everyday practices and
ordinary language of international actors who are formally identified, authorized and justified to
possess the professional knowledge – the particular expertise – that is required to solve the
‘problem’ of the rule of law and thus to translate it into what it should be in practice. Importantly,
the separation and relationship between law and politics is not naturally given in practice and can
therefore not be taken for granted. The boundary between the two realms is narrated and enacted
differently by different actors for a particular purpose, in a given time and place. Indeed,
inscribing meanings into the rule of law follows from enacting and inscribing a particular meaning
into the boundary between law and politics. In sum, the construction of knowledge and meaning
around the ‘rule of law’ unfolds in struggles over discursively fixing, momentarily stabilizing and
thereby inscribing meaning into this boundary, which in turn would authorize a particular group of
actors and their attending solutions to the problem over other actors and their solutions. The construction of knowledge and meaning around the ‘rule of law’, I will demonstrate in this thesis,
is a result of how politics of translation play out in everyday practices of global governance.

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A Neoinstitutional Analysis of the Emerging Organizational Field of Renewable Energy in China

Høyrup Christensen, Nis(Frederiksberg, 2013)

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Today, China is the world leading investor in renewable energy. At the heart of this
effort lies China’s ability to shape markets through industrial policies. Through a
neoinstitutional theoretical perspective this dissertation views China’s efforts within
renewable energy as the emergence of a new organizational field. Despite the
importance of organizational fields as a key concept in the neoinstitutional literature,
there is a lack of studies on exactly how they emerge. Throughout four articles this
dissertation scrutinizes therefore the emergence of the field of renewable energy in
China and the mechanisms driving this emergence.
Firstly, the relation between state and market is examined, and it is argued that Chinese
state interventions in markets, for instance through subsidies, are based in deeply
rooted historic grounds. Thus, the article explains the general context in which the
Party-state handles subsidized markets, like renewable energy.
Secondly, the specific development of the idea of sustainable development, and how it
evolves into an institutional logic of its own, is analysed. It is around this institutional
logic that renewable energy emerges as a field. The key mechanism in play is the idea
work of the Party state by which sustainable development is positioned in the Partystate
discourse.
Thirdly, subsidization of renewable energy in China is examined as an important
feature of the increasing institutionalization of the organizational field. It is shown how
negotiation between companies and Party-state is the vital mechanism by which
subsidies are determined....

This doctoral thesis (PhD) explores from a public governance perspective the role of stateowned
enterprises (SOEs) in an era of marketization of public service provision and thus
contributes to the renewed academic interest in contemporary SOEs. It builds on an explorative
comparative case study of DSB SOV and SJ AB in the marketization of passenger rail in
Denmark and Sweden respectively from the 1990s to 2015. In the period both cases kept full
state ownership and Sweden gradually exposed all services to competition whereas in Denmark
with time competition was put on hold. The case study consists of document study and +50
interviews and is based on a historical institutionalist perspective on gradual change that
emphasizes interpretation in the implementation between rule makers and rule takers as a driver
of institutional change. It leads to the conceptualization of the SOE as an institutional market
actor (IMA).